“We think studying topics like gender, race, and sexuality is worthwhile and getting it right is extremely important,” says Lindsay.

But researchers of these topics have gotten lazy and political, they say. “A culture has developed in which only certain conclusions are allowed—like those that make whiteness and masculinity problematic,” Lindsay says.

Reach politically “correct” conclusions and you
can get most anything published.

“Kind of a last straw happened,” says Lindsay.
“There was this paper well-funded by the National Science Foundation that
studied ‘feminist glaciology.’ It said glacier science is sexist.”

As a glaciologist giving a TED Talk put it, “The
majority of glaciological knowledge that we have today stems from knowledge
created by men about men within existing masculinist stories.”

What?

One paper suggested the solution to sexism in glacier
science is “feminist paintings of glaciers and feminist art
projects,” says Lindsay. They praised art projects like one where they
“hooked up a phone line to a glacier so you could call the glacier on the
phone and listen to it.”

That was “the last straw” for him.

Lindsay adds, “What appears beyond dispute is that
making absurd and horrible ideas sufficiently politically fashionable can get
them validated at the highest levels of academic grievance studies.”

The hoaxers didn’t get to finish their experiment because
The Wall Street Journal’s Jillian Kay Melchior noticed the absurdity of the
paper on dog humping. She exposed the hoax before all 20 journals weighed in.

What upsets me most is what happened—or rather, didn’t happen—next.

No university said it would stop using those journals, and
no journal editor publicly said, “We must raise our standards.”

“Think about if you did this to civil engineers with
bridge building,” says Boghossian. “They would’ve thanked us, right?
Because they’re driving over the bridges with their families, so they don’t
want the bridges to collapse.”

But the journal editors, instead of admitting that they
sometimes publish nonsense, attacked the hoaxers. They accused them of doing
“unethical research.”

A dozen of Boghossian’s colleagues at Portland State
University criticized him anonymously in the school newspaper, which depicted
him as a clown. He’s become a pariah at his own school.

“I’ve been spat on … physically threatened,” he
says.

Instead of applauding him for exposing nonsense, Portland
State threatened him.

I called the school asking for an interview, but it
declined.

How can a college criticize the hoaxers but revere
ridiculous journals that publish nonsense?

“When you live in these tight ecosystems, this stuff makes total sense,” says Boghossian. For people in the tiny bubble of academic thinking, “there’s a pervading rape culture; men are bad—the whole ball of wax.”

It’s been going on for some time. A physicist once submitted
a nonsense paper claiming gravity is just a “social construct.” The
journal Social Text published it. That embarrassed the journal, but 20 years
later, it is still going strong.

At universities, “scholarship” has gotten even
crazier.

The real “hoax” is on students who pay thousands
of dollars for useless degrees in fields that end in “studies.”

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